Justice, James Reagan, and Marguerite Staples Justice

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ORAL HISTORY OF JAMES REAGAN JUSTICE AND
MARGUERITE STAPLES JUSTICE
Interviewed by Sibyl Nestor
November 19, 1973
Interviewer: If you would tell me where you were born and brought up and tell me your name first, so we’ll have that at the very beginning of the tape.
Mr. Justice: J.R. Justice.
Interviewer: And you said you were from Prudden, Tennessee?
Mr. Justice: No, I was born in Shenoa, Kentucky. My father was a civil mining engineer. We moved from there to Holston, Kentucky. Holston, Kentucky to Jellico, Tennessee but I was raised up in Williamsburg, Kentucky…essentially during the period, from say, about the time I was about 10 years old on up, ‘till I was about 20 or 21. I went to school there at Cumberland College. Then went into business school in Cincinnati, Ohio and was also at Knoxville Business College in Knoxville, Tennessee. And went from there to Hamilton National Bank, Hamilton National Bank to Prudden Coal Company. I worked for the Prudden Coal Company for about 10 years, went into the grocery business in Williamsburg, Kentucky and after there, I went back to the Prudden Coal Company about 1940 and ‘41. Worked there until Oak Ridge opened up and jobs became available down here so I quit up there and came got a job down here. First worked for Tennessee Eastman, Tennessee Eastman down to H.D. Ferguson got me; then over to Oak Ridge National Lab. Worked there 20 years. Retired in ‘65.
Interviewer: And you said you were an engineer?
Mr. Justice: My father was.
Interviewer: Oh, your father was an engineer?
Mr. Justice: Civil mining engineer, brother was a civil mining engineer.
Interviewer: I see. I just misunderstood. I thought that what you were saying was that you were a businessman rather than an engineer.
Mr. Justice: Oh yes.
Interviewer: What sort of work did you do at Tennessee Eastman when you first came?
Mr. Justice: Well I was in charge of order receiving at the cafeteria. At H.D. Ferguson Company I was a purchasing agent for them, for the cafeteria. And then I went down to X-10 as a purchasing agent for them in the cafeteria. And then I was assistant manager for a while and then after Carbide took over, I was in charge of ordering and receiving, and finally became cafeteria manager.
Interviewer: So you were involved in feeding all these multitudes of people, when there were so many in Oak Ridge?
Mr. Justice: That’s right. Of course many of the meals served were in Y-12, I was there in the cafeteria.
Interviewer: Well that must have required a lot of food at a time when there was…?
Mr. Justice: It sure did. They brought potatoes by the car load. We had all kinds of storage room there, of course. We brought meat by the car load, we brought produce by the truck load and we brought potatoes by the car load. We had an enormous amount food. At that time there was 700, when I left there was 700 employees in the cafeteria alone.
Interviewer: In the cafeteria alone?
Mr. Justice: That’s right. 700 employees. See they had a lot of these baby cafeterias scattered around the plant, in addition to the two main cafeterias. Had one at 9711-1 and 9711-5, those two buildings were cafeterias. One was in the east end of Y-12, the other was about mid-way down. The plant runs east and west. The one at “-5” was a new one they built after I worked there. They build it in the plant area. I left the cafeteria where I first went to work and went down there, and worked at “-5”.
Interviewer: Did you have problems obtaining food during wartime when things were so scarce?
Mr. Justice: Well, yes. We of course had just so many food stamps allotted to us. We had to keep within the amount that was allotted to us and within that, we had to serve as many fresh vegetables as we could, fresh vegetables and canned vegetables. And of course meat was very hard to obtain. They would have these carloads of meat set up, where you would get so much luncheon meat and along with that you would get so much beef and so much pork. Since you had to buy so much other stuff along with it in order to get this beef and pork. Made menus very hard to write or very hard to figure out.
Interviewer: I’m sure that’s true. And all this food came in by train, into the area, or did you get some of it on a truck?
Mr. Justice: The great majority of came by truck. Shipped all these goods by truck. We got produce out of Atlanta; we got produce out of Chicago.
Interviewer: Feeding all those people must have been a big job. Now, did you serve just the main meal in the middle of the day or did you serve…?
Mr. Justice: We served meals around the clock.
Interviewer: …round the clock?
Mr. Justice: …24 hours a day.
Interviewer: Because there were so many shifts…?
Mr. Justice: There were three shifts. We had three shifts in the cafeteria. We were in operation there 24 hours a day. 8,000 people in these shifts. Of course that was right in the heyday of Y-12. Construction workers alone there was 1,000’s of them… The best I can remember there were restrictions on them eating in the cafeteria. They couldn’t eat in the cafeterias. Only employees of Tennessee Eastman could eat there. And of course AEC employees. At the canteens I think, they could slip in, the construction workers could order at the canteens.
Interviewer: And the people had ration stamps at home. You probably had more people eating there than would have been otherwise.
Mr. Justice: That’s right. So many people you know, it depended on where people lived, people stayed in dormitories and their families weren’t here and they had to eat at the cafeterias.
Interviewer: Now when you came here, did you come to this house, or did you live in the Oak Ridge area?
Mr. Justice: Yes we lived here until a house became available in Oak Ridge. We lived here 3 or 4 months, something like that, before we could get a house in Oak Ridge. On Parker Road to start with.
Interviewer: That’s off Pennsylvania?
Mr. Justice: That’s right. It was right there on the corner: 101 Parker Road. And then we got a ‘C’ house, and we moved up there just this side of ???? Road, off one of the streets there. We lived up there until Mr. Boggs died. Mr. and Mrs. Boggs lived here you see, my wife’s maiden name. And when he died we said that this became available and let’s move over here with her. She was living by herself. We moved over here. (??)
Interviewer: And did you move out here before they had the gates open, or was it not until after they opened the gates?
Mr. Justice: Well, we moved out here after, out here after the war was over.
Interviewer: So you didn’t have to have a pass to get in and out then?
Mr. Justice: So we moved out here in, I believe he died in the year the war was over. We moved out here after the gates were open. He died in August of ’45 I believe. Yes, that’s when it was, August ’45; the war was over in ’45. By that time I was working at X-10 (??)
Interviewer: When the war was over, and so many people left fairly shortly, did this make a great deal of difference in the cafeteria operations?
Mr. Justice: Sure.
Interviewer: Right away?
Mr. Justice: The place where I was, I was at X-10 then, I don’t think it affected everybody at that time. X-10 was a small place, the smallest one of any of them, very small. It didn’t compare, of course, to Y-12 or K-25, either one. Eventually it became one of the largest, one of the largest cafeterias in volume.
Interviewer: I did not know anything about the relative size of the plants.
Mr. Justice: As far as the size of the plants is concerned, of course, X-10 is scattered all over creation out there. They placed stuff everywhere out there. As far as acreage covered, I don’t know. I guess Y-12, Y-12 or K-25 as far as acreage is involved, is about the largest.
Interviewer: I was thinking in terms of the size, as the number of employees when I said size. I think Y-12 is not as large as K-25 now, but during the war it was much larger. Is that …?
Mr. Justice: Well…
Interviewer: Is it that they didn’t do as much shift work?
Mr. Justice: I really don’t know too much about K-25. I’d say you’d be about right about that: Y-12 had more employees than K-25. I guess so. I know they do have now. X-10 has got Biology, which is associated with X-10 and of course is located at Y-12. And they’re counted in as employees of X-10 and that’s quite a large operation and staff. At one time X-10 operated a canteen over there for the Biology Department. But they got away from that.
Interviewer: Well, when you actually lived in Oak Ridge, during the war years, was inconvenient to be behind the gates? Did you find this to be …?
Mr. Justice: No, not particularly.
Interviewer: Where did you do your personal shopping, the food that your wife served at home, and your clothing, and this kind of thing?
Mr. Justice: We did it in Oak Ridge.
Interviewer: You did in Oak Ridge. During those years, when we came to Oak Ridge, the Jackson Square area was the only shopping center, which was really operating beyond the small neighborhood grocery stores, places like Elm Grove and Pine Valley, places like that. Was there more shopping for clothes and things like that during the war years or was there just the Loveman’s Store that was there then?
Mr. Justice: Now, what?
Interviewer: There was a Loveman’s Store, in Jackson Square, was that the only place to buy department store goods?
Mr. Justice: Well I guess it was.
Interviewer: But I guess your wife would have done this more than you, so she knew a bit more…
Mr. Justice: Of course we, a lot of times we wouldn’t go to places like that, we would go into Knoxville. Grocery shopping, of course we did all that in Oak Ridge. We did other shopping in Knoxville, for clothes and things like that. In fact, we didn’t even have an ???? we got Miller’s, and Loveman’s and Hall’s.
Interviewer: In the years we’ve been here, that’s been one of the greatest changes in Oak Ridge, the greater availability of shopping.
Mr. Justice: That’s right. It’s become a shopping center for the whole area now, this part of the country at least. The sales tax is one thing, the sales tax in Oak Ridge compared to Knoxville. It’s a lot more convenient …???? it’s a lot easier getting into Oak Ridge compared to Knoxville.
Interviewer: Do you farm this land here? Have you done that since you lived out here?
Mr. Justice: No, I never did farm it until after I retired. Oh, I think one year here I planted a garden out there, but I was too busy working to tend to a garden. I have always liked to do it but just didn’t take the time to do it. Always thought I’d start in on it when I retired, had to have something to do. I plowed everything around her I could plow.
Interviewer: How long have you been coming to the Farmer’s Market?
Mr. Justice: Since, I’d say about ’66, 1966. 1965 was the year I retired, I think I started in ’66. I did that through, now see what was that name up here above Clinton, old man, do you remember him? Bridges, that right. He was influential in finally talking me into it. He was influential in getting me to come over. I didn’t raise any quandary or anything… I saw what I could do. In all I raise everything I can raise here.
Interviewer: Do you know many of the people who were here during the …
Mr. Justice: … the early years…
Interviewer: …during the early years? Do you have neighbors, for example, have you heard people talk about how they felt about Oak Ridge coming in? Did the people, were they enthusiastic about it? Or did they feel negative about it?
Mr. Justice: Well, it really all depended on whether they worked in Oak Ridge or not. Whether they had a job over there or not. Those who didn’t have a job, they weren’t too enthusiastic about it. I know I do a little bird hunting, here and there, up toward, up in Morgan County and on up in there. I’d do a little bird hunting and there was quite a bit of resentment up there, against the Oak Ridgers, you know, because so many of them would come up there and hunt without permission and things like that. It’s one of the times having an Anderson County license on your car wasn’t too popular. Someone was asked if he had a license and they’d said “no”, no license to hunt. Of course that probably wasn’t true about all of them, but some of them were used to just hunting anywhere they wanted to and they went on people’s land without asking about it. Of course it created some resentment against Anderson County. It could have happened, not to Oak Ridgers, but people outside of Oak Ridge for that matter. Of course this became a whole lot more thickly populated, more people worked in Oak Ridge and lived in Anderson County, outside of Oak Ridge. There were people who would hunt on people’s land, and not ask to hunt at all, it doesn’t matter if they were from Oak Ridge or Anderson County.
Interviewer: Anytime you have an influx of people from outside, you’re going to get some people who will give everybody a bad name.
Mr. Justice: That’s right.
Interviewer: Do you feel that having Oak Ridge here has increased the prosperity of this area?
Mr. Justice: Oh absolutely. It’s made this part of the country. It sure has.
Interviewer: What are the biggest differences that you see between when you visited before and …?
Mr. Justice: Before there wasn’t anything here except farms. That’s all there was.
Interviewer: So that was all anybody did, was farm?
Mr. Justice: With the exception, of course of Anderson Mills here in Clinton, which is closed down. There were no manufacturing plants at all. Of course you get jobs in there, either up there or farm, one or the other.
Interviewer: Is that Magnet Mills?
Mr. Justice: Magnet Mills, in Clinton.
Interviewer: And they made hosiery?
Mr. Justice: That’s right. And they employed, I don’t know what, at least 600, 700, 800 people in there.
Interviewer: But that was the only industry?
Mr. Justice: That was the only industry at all in this part of the country. Of course there would be as many people, I guess, that worked in Knoxville and then went back to the farms from Anderson County as lived in Knoxville. As far as anything in the neighborhood here, there was no employment whatever except maybe…?? or working on a farm, or coal mining. Of course no coal mining in Anderson County to speak of. (??) There is no question about it that Oak Ridge has made Anderson County, and Roane County and all the surrounding counties here. If you were close enough to where you could commute as far as to Oak Ridge.
Interviewer: What did the people think that was being made in Oak Ridge when it first came in?
Mr. Justice: Well, they hadn’t the slightest idea. As far as I was personally concerned, it didn’t interest me one way or the other. I mean, I didn’t even think about it. All I was interested in was a job and I didn’t have any curiosity about it whatever. Of course, I had no curiosity in one way, in that, it didn’t worry me at all. I knew, I didn’t ask any questions about anything.
Interviewer: Well, I’m from Middle Tennessee and people down there used to make quaint speculations. Like, one of the things that people said was that they were making campaign buttons for FDR. [laugh] I wondered if you had heard any stories like that?
Mr. Justice: No. The thing is, you see, they’d see these trains loaded with something going in to Oak Ridge your know, the train carrying this load and nothing coming out. They couldn’t figure it, they couldn’t figure it. They didn’t have any manufacturing or anything over there. There wouldn’t be anything coming out. So they just couldn’t figure it out. That’s the thing about it, that’s the thing I heard, more than anything else, what in the world could they be making when they weren’t shipping anything out of there. Everything was going in and nothing coming out. [laugh] And of course, there were people who thought they people in Oak Ridge got a whole lot more food, and with rationing and all and everything they figured they were being preferentially treated. They had a lot of things given to them, of course, people outside of Oak Ridge couldn’t get. There was really resentment about that.
Interviewer: Do you feel there was any basis for truth in this or was it just how people felt?
Mr. Justice: Well, I don’t think there was any question but what the people in Oak Ridge, as far as the cafeterias and cigarettes and things like that, they were able to get more than the people outside. I guess because they had to keep people happy. There was a lot of turnover that forced a lot of those people, you know, either it’s a question of working out there or going in to the army, one.
Interviewer: Of course, they had to have preferential treatment as far as construction materials, because there was no place for those people to live.
Mr. Justice: That’s right. That’s right. I know as far as personally, as far as food stamps are concerned, gasoline stamps, things like that, I guess…. Well, of course, there were those people that worked in there that lived outside. Oak Ridge couldn’t possibly take care of, you know, the housing situation over there. There were people from outside that worked there and of course they had to get back in cars. And they had a good many buses, even the taxis. An awful lot of private cars on the road, too. And they needed gasoline. They only got it through the fact that they had to get that to get to work.
Interviewer: So they weren’t much ahead.
Mr. Justice: No.
Interviewer: They had to have more to use.
Mr. Justice: That’s right. But, a lot of people just thought that they were getting more than outside people could get. What year did you come to Oak Ridge?
Interviewer: We came in 1953. So we’ve been here a good while but we don’t remember the real early days.
Mr. Justice: I came in ’43.
Interviewer: Do you remember the mud: The boardwalks?
Mr. Justice: No, I don’t ..(?)..
Interviewer: No, I mean do you remember, they tell us many stories about the…
Mr. Justice: Oh, the mud! I thought you meant… I had something else in my mind when you said that. Oh yes, I assure you. In Knoxville, you know, they could tell an Oak Ridger by his shoes: he’d have mud all over them – they could tell whether you were from Oak Ridge or not. They used to be able to identify you even with sidewalks. When I came to Oak Ridge, Y-12 was rather muddy. I never saw so much mud as that in my life. That was the worst mud ever. And they had thousands and thousands of loads of gravel in there and it’d just sink out of sight. It was built right in a swamp. [noise] Can’t hear because of the traffic coming from Y-12. It was awful.
Interviewer: The mud is one of the things people like to tell stories about; and nearly everybody seems to have some sort of humorous stories about the problems of getting in and out through the locked gates.
Mr. Justice: That’s right.
Interviewer: Did you ever have anything funny happen to you?
Mr. Justice: No. I never did. I never did have anything happen to me at all. The main thing, of course, many of them tried to take whiskey into Oak Ridge.
Interviewer: Really?
Mr. Justice: That was the main thing, back in those days, to try to get whiskey through the gate. And those people, they want to have whiskey in one way or the other. And they were confiscating that whiskey, you know. If they caught you with whiskey, they’d search your car. And you never knew when they were going to search it. Sometimes you would go through and they never would search you, and other times they would. And, so, many of them got caught. And many a car had their whiskey removed and why, I understand, maybe, 15, 20, 30, 40, 50 dollars of whiskey, and they find a case of whiskey in there, and they’d come through and they’d search you and they’d lose it. It’d cost you. Oh when that happened, it was thousands of gallons of whiskey got caught.
Interviewer: I wonder what they did with it?
Mr. Justice: Yeah, that’s what I was wondering. [laugh] There used to be a rumor out, you know, that the AEC, of course, the Army you know, was in charge over there, that they never ran out of whiskey over there that with the Army officers and everything, they always got all the whiskey they wanted free. The lieutenants, and captains and majors and lieutenant colonels and everything else in there.
Interviewer: I’m sure there certainly were a lot of high-ranking officers. It was a very important project. Did your wife’s people, the Boggs, did they lose any of their land when they brought the construction in?
Mr. Justice: Yes. Yes. In this section, they owned about 410 acres you see, at that time, across the road, over here they owned that. You know where the big spring is down here they owned all that.
Interviewer: Key Springs?
Mr. Justice: Yeah, they owned that down there, and the road where the big spring is and down below it, of course, that went over into Oak Ridge.
Interviewer: A big spring like that was valuable property in those days too.
Mr. Justice: That’s right. It’s really valuable now. With Oliver Springs using the spring now it wouldn’t supply any water. Yes, they lost… I don’t know how much land they lost. My wife could tell better than I can. I don’t know how much land there was. They had 400 and some odd acres here to start with. Of course, they sold off some before the war. They sold this off to ?Wishburn? over here, across the railroad track over here, where the Kile place is now. They sold Dr. Kile his place here across and over to where Dr. Kile lives. And up on the hill, they had land up there on the hill. That’s all sold off. And over here, next to the river, you know, that strip of land up there where that beer place is, up there. You know that strip of land right in there, and that was sold off. And, of course, Oak Ridge wouldn’t take that. TVA took this piece over here.
Interviewer: This area had a lot of land taken, what with TVA and …
Mr. Justice: That’s right.
Interviewer: One of the people I talked to said that they knew someone who had had their land taken when they built the Smoky Mountains Park. And, then they bought land in Norris, or where Norris Lake is, not in Norris, but where Norris Lake is and that had been taken. And so then, they had come over here to Oak Ridge, where they thought couldn’t find them, and by-golly they came along and took it too. I understand there was a good deal of resentment about this, particularly in people who had been run off the second and third time.
Mr. Justice: Well, so many times they don’t think they received enough compensation for it. And probably they didn’t some of them. I don’t know. As far as Mr. Boggs is concerned, I don’t think he and the land he lost down there, he didn’t get everything.
Interviewer: Did it cause any sort of an economic slump in the area around Oak Ridge when so many people left after Oak Ridge – How many people were there – 60,000 people, at one point?
Mr. Justice: I really don’t know.
Interviewer: There was a tremendous number of people here.
Mr. Justice: There were an awful lot of people, no question about it.
Interviewer: And when the war was over, a lot of people left because they cut down the operation so much. Did this cause any sort of an economic slump in this area?
Mr. Justice: Oh, yeah. Sure. Sure did.
Interviewer: Who was hit the worst: Would it have been the merchants or the …?
Mr. Justice: Well I guess business in general. ‘Course the more of those people you know, came from outside. They just went back to where they were working to start with, I guess. Lloyd Hickey(?) was down here from Middleburg and that area, a 100 miles away. That fella just went back home and I haven’t seen him. The majority of the wages from Oak Ridge …?… And I say in the radius here of 100 miles, this caused an economic slump. Would not be at all surprised if that happened.
Interviewer: And I guess there were people who were laid off the jobs there who lived there, as well as change in the amount of money people were spending, when there were that many people here. What did you, how did you feel when they exploded the atomic bomb, and you found out what they had really been doing in Oak Ridge?
Mr. Justice: Well, I just couldn’t conceive of the thing. I read everything in the newspapers coming out, I read everything in the world I could about it. You know, you expect to hear answers, you know, to tell you the truth. Of course, being in the cafeteria, and, of course someone who’s working in the plants as well, and they seemed a whole lot more interested than I did. I was only interested as a businessman, that’s all I cared anything about. But it sure was a surprise to me. I’ll tell you… It’s hard for anyone to visualize what kind of a thing it is, what it is, whether you were a scientist and understand the things involved in it. I don’t know about everybody.
Interviewer: Well, I think people were stunned all over the country by this. I was still in junior high school and I don’t think I had any conception of what it really meant. Of the difference it was going to make in the history of this country, really.
Mr. Justice: True.
Interviewer: Because, it was sort of a watershed in a lot of ways, when they first exploded that bomb.
Mr. Justice: We’re saying we’re ahead because we got it first. That’s the best thing. If Germany had gotten it, then we wouldn’t be here today, I don’t guess.
Interviewer: Circumstances would be very different now, I think.
Mr. Justice: They were the ones saying they were on to it, you know. We just beat them to it, that’s all.
Interviewer: Did you have children living with you during your time you lived in Oak Ridge?
Mr. Justice: Oh yes. Of course, both my boy and girl graduated from Oak Ridge High School.
Interviewer: Where are they living now?
Mr. Justice: My son is a lawyer in Knoxville and my daughter is living in Virginia Beach, Virginia. She’s married, my son is not married, and I have two grandchildren.
Interviewer: It’s nice that they are not so terribly far away.
Mr. Justice: No.
Interviewer: How did your kids feel about Oak Ridge?
Mr. Justice: They’re crazy about it, crazy about it.
Interviewer: And they liked going to school there?
Mr. Justice: Well they sure did. In fact, after we moved out of here, my daughter kept an apartment there in Oak Ridge. She was, at that time, working at the plant, and she kept an apartment there in Oak Ridge so that Jim, my son, could still go to school in Oak Ridge. He was younger than she was. And so, he could continue going and graduate from the high school in Oak Ridge. If he moved out here, he wasn’t eligible to attend school in Oak Ridge. But she kept this apartment there so he could go to school in Oak Ridge and finish up there.
Interviewer: It must have been interesting to go to school here, in those years. There were so many young people.
Mr. Justice: That’s right. …?…
Interviewer: When they went, did they ever talk about, did people seemed to take a different attitude toward them, because they had been to Oak Ridge, did they ever feel that this was… I don’t know quite how to phrase my question. Did they ever feel that they were sort of a curiosity, because they lived in Oak Ridge?
Mr. Justice: Hmm, I couldn’t say. No, I don’t think so. Of course, I guess they were subject to a lot of questions everywhere they went, in the early days. I don’t know.
Interviewer: Were there any things you particularly liked about living in Oak Ridge, or that you particularly disliked?
Mr. Justice: There’s nothing I disliked about it at all. I liked Oak Ridge. Oak Ridge is one of the most modern cities in the country. Everything is laid out just the way it should be. I liked Oak Ridge very much.
Interviewer: It was easier to find things then than it is now since it has expanded. There are ‘C’ streets in other areas.
Mr. Justice: Yes, that’s true. All those housing developments in Oak Ridge. Of course it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack, when you try to find a place there. The main part of Oak Ridge was built during the war, everyone can find their way around. But, in the other parts, it’s whatever; I wouldn’t know how to start to find someone in. The streets were all laid out, you know, and all of them started with the same letter, and the side streets. And then the way they built the streets, you know, the children were all; you know, the circles, all kept away from the traffic. You could raise a family without any danger of getting run over in traffic or anything like that, with young children, back in those side streets. Certainly well laid out, I tell you that. I guess that’s not true however, with the parts, the housing and all after Oak Ridge, after the war.
Interviewer: They have done pretty well. But of course it’s not done in a systematic way, that was done when the whole original part of the city was built.
Mr. Justice: Anything you do with the idea of making money, anything that was laid out the other way.
Interviewer: Wee, is there anything… I have asked all my questions. Is there anything you would like to add from your point of view as a businessman and long-time resident, that you think would be good, that I haven’t asked yet?
Mr. Justice: I think it is one of the best places in the country to live, certainly right in this vicinity. I have no grand desire, to live anywhere else. I feel after I retired, some people saying, if I’d wanted to live someplace else, I’d have moved there. I didn’t course, we live here in this house and …(?) If I’d had my choice, there isn’t anywhere else I like to be, other that right here. Sure enough. Every kind of recreational opportunity here you can possibly have anyway: fishing, hunting, about anything you’re looking for. Sure happy with it.
Interviewer: I thing a lot of people came in from further off, and have become very attached to it, and I know we have.
Mr. Justice: Quite a number of people I’ve talked to, who have come here from different sections of the country say this is, this is God’s country here. They’re crazy about it. There was this lady down here yesterday, I believe she was here from the state of Washington. And, she said she’d been here about four years, something like that, she was some kind of advisor connected to X-10 or somewhere, and she said that she was staying.
Interviewer: It’s a good place. Unless you have something else you’d like to talk about, I might talk to Mrs. Justice then.
[Side 1, part 2]
ORAL HISTORY OF MARGUERITE STAPLES JUSTICE
Interviewer: Now, to start, if you would tell me about the house, I understand
you were born here, and what your name is now, and what your maiden name was, and maybe a bit about your family that lived here.
Mrs. Justice: I was born right here in this house. Well, this was Dossett at that time and I was born here. My mother died when I was about 18 months old. My grandparents took me and so I lived on here, and my little brother. I stayed here until I married. Well I worked, I worked around everyplace: I was with the railroad some, different jobs that I had at Prudden Coal Company. When I married I really left, I didn’t really leave this place until I married.
Interviewer: What sort of work did you do?
Mrs. Justice: I was an operator for the L&N Railroad. Then I was a secretary at Prudden Coal Company.
Interviewer: That must have been an interesting thing to do.
Mrs. Justice: Yes it was, very interesting. Mr. Griffin, Charlie Griffin, up at Prudden, he was the President of the mines at that time and general manager.
Interviewer: And then when you married….
Mrs. Justice: I married; I met my husband in Prudden, when I went to Prudden to work. We were both; I was in the office and he was in the store. So that’s where we met.
Interviewer: And then were your children born in Kentucky or were they…?
Mrs. Justice: My children, we lived in mining camps. See Prudden is a mining camp.
Interviewer: I see.
Mrs. Justice: We didn’t have any children for about 2 years. And after two years we had a daughter. We then went to Yellow Creek, which is still owned by the Prudden Coal Company. My husband was managing the store and I had the office. Now that was before I had any children. After I had children, I didn’t work. Both my children… My daughter was born in Knoxville because, at that time, they didn’t have room down at Prudden and it was dangerous to stay up there. So I came to Knoxville, ‘cause I was coming to the hospital there, came down three weeks before she was born, and then we went back up and lived at Yellow Creek, which was owned by the Prudden Coal Company. Then after five and half years, I had a son. He was born, up, by that time, we had a road across the mountain to Middlesboro. He was born in the hospital in Middlesboro.
Interviewer: That was a lot easier for you.
Mrs. Justice: Very much. Well I waited there 3 weeks. I was afraid to wait to the last minute because it took too long to come.
Interviewer: Now did you tell me your name?
Mrs. Justice: I didn’t tell you my name. I was Marguerite Staples.
Interviewer: Marguerite Staples.
Mrs. Justice: That was my maiden name. My mother was Blanche Cross. She married William Staples.
Interviewer: Was it the Staples family that had this house?
Mrs. Justice: No, Cross. My grandfather’s name was Joe Black Cross, J.B. Cross. This was his home. He started housekeeping here. My mother was born here. Every child he had was born here. He stayed here until he died and my grandmother died here too. After my grandfather died, Ada (?) Boggs, my mothers’ sister, her husband bought the farm. Well this was still home to me, so I stayed on here. This was the home I’d come in the war to, I worked too at that time, but this was always home. I’d come back. ‘Course now I’m getting the cart before the horse, because I’m telling about, then after I got married, you see. After I was an operator on the L&N Railroad. That was copying train orders and things like that and checking on the trains to run.
Interviewer: Maybe you could tell me a little about the Cross family. This is certainly one of the handsomest houses in this part of Tennessee. I would like to know a little about, little more about it’s history and about the Cross family. Your husband said that originally there were 450 acres.
Mrs. Justice: No, around 500 I guess. I don’t know. There was quite a bit of land, all around. In Oak Ridge – you’ve not ready for that yet are you?
Interviewer: Well, it’s real important. And I’d like to hear….
Mrs. Justice: When Oak Ridge came here, they took the Bacon Springs. They took that. That’s all part of the farm they took. In ’45, my uncle, which is Boggs, who had bought the place, died. His wife… They didn’t have any children. She’s my mother’s sister, and she couldn’t get anybody to stay with her. I came over. We moved over here in about ’47. I had two children and we were living in Oak Ridge. We had moved from Yellow Creek or Prudden to here. Then I took care of her for 20 years. She’s in a rest home down in Oak Ridge now; she’s 92.
Interviewer: You mentioned her when were talking on the phone. Did you know many of the people who lived in what is now the Oak Ridge area? Did you visit back and forth?
Mrs. Justice: I knew everybody. I knew all that farmed this section. The McKameys, Peake… I’m trying to think of that man’s name. It was just after I came. But they all just had a fit when they took their farms. Every one of them resented it. Especially one man, I was reading that he’d sued. He just wouldn’t give up at all. He almost cracked up over it. Of course, didn’t anybody like the idea. Well, they didn’t know what it was, and it just looked like somebody was coming in and just taking over their place where they’d lived all of their lives. And there wasn’t so very many farmers out here, I think, we just had the farm down there, and there were very few, very few. All spread out, you know.
Interviewer: Do you remember the name of the family that lived where the big spring is, where the Oak Ridge swimming pool is now?
Mrs. Justice: Oh yes. That was cousin Ethel. My cousin Ethel Cross.
Interviewer: Oh so she [sic] was actually some of your family.
Mrs. Justice: Oh yes. And that was his home place. His father and my grandfather had the same name: Joe Black Cross. They called the one in Oak Ridge… “Robertsville”, that was the name of the little place, “Robertsville Joe”. And my grandfather, “Black Oak Ridge Joe”. Just to separate them. They were double first cousins, I think. They both had the same name.
Interviewer: I guess they were probably named after the same person. Did you go to school?
Mrs. Justice: I went to school in the country school, that was just tiny, a country school down here.
Interviewer: Was it in the Oak Ridge area?
Mrs. Justice: No, Dossett. It’s gone now.
Interviewer: Down here by the railroad station?
Mrs. Justice: Yes. And I went to Winchester, Tennessee to school, and I wound up in Knoxville. I finished my education which was [laugh] in Knoxville. Those are the only places I ever been to school: Winchester and Knoxville. I was over there two different times. I was over there when I was small and then when I got in high school.
Interviewer: You were talking about how the people felt when the land was taken over. What sort of justification was made to them for taking it over?
Mrs. Justice: Well I don’t know. I don’t remember about that so much now. But they didn’t think they had gotten enough for it.
Interviewer: They didn’t feel they’d got enough money?
Mrs. Justice: No they didn’t think they’d got enough money and they didn’t want to give it up in any case.
Interviewer: Well, I’m sure of that.
Mrs. Justice: That was home and …
Interviewer: Did most of them find places in the area, or did a good many of them leave?
Mrs. Justice: No, they left. Copelands had a home there, you know this brick house as you come out to Elza Gate? That was their house and they had to give it up. Clark Lee [?] lives down there, he had a little farm. And the Peaks, the Cables [?]. But they owned big farms, so they covered quite a bit of territory. So, there weren’t too many farms down there because by the time they, this was a big territory, why, they took it all up, you see. Of course there were little farms too.
Interviewer: Well, I’ve noticed that there seem to be a lot of small cemeteries around Oak Ridge.
Mrs. Justice: Well everybody had their cemetery on their farm in those days, because there wasn’t a cemetery around here. And there are plots everywhere. Now the Gambles, that’s who I was trying to think of a while ago, now he just, he just really went off the deep when they took his place. And that little cemetery back over there near Kern’s Methodist Church, now his house was this side, down on the Turnpike, where those big, there are some big trees, or was, I didn’t know if there is now or not. Now that was their home. But, he just literally got his gun and said he’d just dared anyone to come in here and take his. Of course, they did take it. He was very unhappy. Gamble, Oscar Gamble was his name. He fought hard.
Interviewer: There is a section in Oak Ridge now which is known as Gamble Valley.
Mrs. Justice: Yes.
Interviewer: It is known as Scarboro. I wonder, I guess this was named after his family.
Mrs. Justice: I guess it was. I’m almost sure it was. Because there is a lot of Gambles down there.
Interviewer: This man, Mr. Gamble, I guess there just really wasn’t much he could do but leave.
Mrs. Justice: No they couldn’t. He couldn’t do anything about it. They took it.
Interviewer: There is not any way to fight the government.
Mrs. Justice: They took it. You can’t fight the government. Now, he certainly tried.
Interviewer: Do you think the people who left are resigned now?
Mrs. Justice: Why, yes. Most of them are gone, dead.
Interviewer: Well, it’s been a long time.
Mrs. Justice: It’s been a long time. And these people were older anyway.
Interviewer: It breaks old people’s heart to have to leave their place.
Mrs. Justice: Yes. Well, they’d been living there. That had been their home for years and years and years. You can see why they just – to have somebody come in and take their home over. Say “get out”. I can imagine how they’d feel.
Interviewer: I can imagine. I really can. If someone came in and said they were going to take my house, I would be very upset. Well, I’m glad that this one wasn’t taken. That it was on the edge. Because it is such a beautiful place.
Mrs. Justice: It could have been, too. I tell you. Bacon Springs down here was part of the farm. They took that. Of course Mr. and Mrs. Boggs, they were up in the air about it. They didn’t like it one bit. And they didn’t like the Oak Ridge people on account of that. And there is nobody around here that like the Oak Ridge people just because of that. They just took a dislike to them, and have their mouths set. Because of the Oak Ridgers, they always had something sly to say about them. But you can see why they feel that way. Because it just looked like robbery. They came in, taking possession when they shouldn’t do it.
Interviewer: Mr. Wells, the editor of the Clinton Courier, I talked to him. He said that the land acquisition in Oak Ridge was not nearly as well handled as it was for Norris Lake.
Mrs. Justice: I don’t think so either.
Interviewer: He felt that they had local people do that, and they had a little more time to do it in. And therefore, there wasn’t as much resentment as there was in Oak Ridge.
Mrs. Justice: I don’t think there was quite as much resentment in Norris. Although those people were terribly upset. But, I don’t think there is as much as Oak Ridge, because they took in so much territory, a lot more territory. 56,000 acres isn’t it?
Interviewer: Well, of course, I don’t know how much land the lake covers.
Mrs. Justice: I don’t either. …it goes way down.
Interviewer: The Oak Ridge reservation is really a very large area.
Mrs. Justice: I think it is 56,000 acres.
Interviewer: I don’t really know how much land they took.
Mrs. Justice: And the Daughters [?] That’s all the way down to Wheat. See they took all that section.
Interviewer: Now, Wheat is where K-25 is. Is that right?
Mrs. Justice: Yes. That’s where the Daughter [?] farm was. Now I wasn’t too familiar with those people. They’re in the family most too, but that was farther away, and we didn’t… I wasn’t down in there much. I just knew about the families close to me.
Interviewer: You lived in Oak Ridge during a good part of the war?
Mrs. Justice: Yes, my husband worked at the plant, and my children went to school in Oak Ridge. Both of them graduated from Oak Ridge. And then of course my son went away to college. My daughter went to Business College. I’ll tell about my family. He is an attorney in Knoxville and she did secretary work. She had a good job down in Oak Ridge.
Interviewer: You are the first woman that I have talked to, and real glad to be able to sort of get a woman’s voice.
Mrs. Justice: Well I’m just a native. I just know the things (?). Having been born and reared here, knowing all the old families, why I just remember all about what a ruckus it was.
Interviewer: Do you remember any interesting stories about the ruckus?
Mrs. Justice: No, nothing more than the Gamble man. He’s the one that raised such a big ruckus. He got his shotgun and just laid around just waiting for someone to come see him. He was going to blow their brains out. But they got him to quiet down. He really went off.
Interviewer: If somebody was coming to take your land it…
Mrs. Justice: He just went crazy. It just upset him to no end. But I don’t know of anybody else who had any trouble. He’s the only one that absolutely refused.
Interviewer: I used to know a man who’s name was Diggs.
Mrs. Justice: Oh, he lives right down here. He raised his farm here for years and years.
Interviewer: Is he still living?
Mrs. Justice: Yes.
Interviewer: Well he used to…
Mrs. Justice: Alvin Diggs.
Interviewer: Yes. He used to bring me eggs years ago. And was one of the people I had thought about talking to but I wasn’t able to get in touch with him.
Mrs. Justice: He lives in this big white house down here, second house down.
Interviewer: Well, he told me that, I believe he said he had been in Norris. And when they came…
Mrs. Justice: I don’t know where they came from. I know he worked for Mr. Boggs for years and years, on the farm. He ran the farm. He had 2 boys, both of them were born here; they growed and married. They still live down there. Mrs. Boggs sold them that house after Mr. Boggs died. They were good neighbors.
Interviewer: Maybe you can tell me something about living in Oak Ridge during the early years, from a woman’s point of view. Because you were the one that had to go out and scrounge around and get clothes for your children and find something to put on the table.
Mrs. Justice: Oh, it was terrible to try to do anything. Oak Ridge was just a mud hole to begin with, in the first place. We all had to bring golloshes. And we’d just wade in mud clear up to our knees. That’s before they had any sidewalks or anything. And there were all these bulldozers tearing up the place. And of course, we had stamps. We were just allowed so much. Like soap, or anything like that was all rationed. It was real hard, it was real hard, I’ll tell you.
Interviewer: Did you have much trouble getting clothes for the children?
Mrs. Justice: No, I didn’t have too much trouble getting clothes.
Interviewer: You had to go to Knoxville?
Mrs. Justice: Yes. We had nothing here – no stores or anything like that here.
Interviewer: It used to be, the roads to Knoxville used to be pretty bad.
Mrs. Justice: Terrible. People who lived in Knoxville, in the Miller’s shoe department – that’s where everybody used to go, to the shoe department, and they’d have mud just all over them. Their shoes, their feet were nothing but mud. And they would just carry mud into that store. Seriously, it would [… ? ….] Just as soon as they’d come in, they’d look at their feet and say “well I know where you’re from.” But they had the money to buy, you know, they made good money. And they stayed. So they really were mighty glad to see them even though they were muddy.
Interviewer: Oak Ridge has brought a good bit of money into this area over the years.
Mrs. Justice: Yes, it has.
Interviewer: Along with some other things that maybe haven’t been so much appreciated.
Mrs. Justice: Yeah.
Interviewer: Did you have any idea what they were doing at the plants?
[end of Side 1]
[Side 2]
Mrs. Justice: As I say, I don’t know anything about the City. He, you can talk to Mr. Justice. ‘Course I grew up here.
Interviewer: Yes, of course.
Mrs. Justice: He’s been here, we came down here in ’43.
Interviewer: You both have a lot of interesting things to say.
Mrs. Justice: Oh yes, very interesting. Very interesting. I like it here.
Interviewer: How did you like living behind the locked gate?
Mrs. Justice: I didn’t mind. I didn’t mind.
Interviewer: You didn’t find this too much of a nuisance with relatives?
Mrs. Justice: You had to have a pass to get in. Any outsider, they couldn’t get in here at all unless they had some friend in Oak Ridge who could get them a pass. I got a lot of passes for people to get in.
Interviewer: Did you visit back and forth with the Boggs very much?
Mrs. Justice: Oh yes. I’d come over here. All you do is just show your badge.
Interviewer: It wasn’t any trouble getting in and out if you lived here?
Mrs. Justice: No. I had a badge at the time. See I worked. Everybody that lived in Oak Ridge had a badge. I’d come over here because we lived here.
Interviewer: Did you work during the war years?
Mrs. Justice: Yes, I worked at Cambridge Hall. That was where the higher-up Army people stayed; the colonels, the lieutenants, and all the officers, in that building. I kept that building.
Interviewer: This was sort of a dormitory.
Mrs. Justice: It was a dormitory, Cambridge Hall. That was the name of it. They called it “M6” at the beginning.
Interviewer: They did?
Mrs. Justice: Then they gave it the name “Cambridge Hall”.
Interviewer: Did you know that they’re just tearing it down now?
Mrs. Justice: No, I hadn’t heard that. They are!?
Interviewer: I believe…
Mrs. Justice: They’re tearing some down. Let’s see. I don’t know. They’ve torn down so many. I don’t thing they’re tearing that down yet. It’s right there on Tyron Road, you know.
Interviewer: No, you’re quite right. It’s the other two that were left that they’re tearing down. And Cambridge Hall is not being torn down.
Mrs. Justice: They’re tearing some down.
Interviewer: I guess that was one of the most central ones, and that’s why it had the higher-ranking people there.
Mrs. Justice: That was right in town. That was right in town, and the cafeteria was just right up the hill from Cambridge Hall.
Interviewer: Now, where was the cafeteria?
Mrs. Justice: You know where the post office is? It was the building right straight across from the post office, where the post office is now. Just a great big, long building.
Interviewer: Is that he building that burned a few years ago?
Mrs. Justice: Yes, I believe it is. My son sold newspapers. He was just about 10 years old. He sold newspapers… That was the year that President Roosevelt died.
Interviewer: Mr. Justice said that you lived on Parker Road, I think, in the beginning.
Mrs. Justice: Parker Road. We did. And we moved to West Fairview.
Interviewer: West Fairview. Now that’s off…
Mrs. Justice: That’s just off Tennessee, off Florida. Tennessee then Florida. Tennessee is right here, then Florida. We lived there in a ‘C’ house, until we came here. After my son… They just wouldn’t give you rooms, different bedrooms unless the children were larger. “Cause if they were little, they just had to sleep together. They couldn’t do it. We watched our house go up, on Parker Road. And that was just an ‘A’ house. No, it was a ‘B’, I take that back. It was a ‘B’. And it was just two bedrooms. And I had a pretty hard time getting a 3-bedroom house. But after my son got bigger, you see, and having a daughter and a son, why they’d give you a 3-bedroom house.
Interviewer: Did you have to wait for that very long after you applied?
Mrs. Justice: Oh, yes. I waited quite a while.
Interviewer: How did you apply for a larger house?
Mrs. Justice: Well, I had Mr. Dooley, my boss, he was over the dormitories, he helped me along on that. You just applied at Housing.
Interviewer: At MSI?
Mrs. Justice: Uh huh, and you’d get a house if you were ever going to.
Interviewer: But there was a waiting period?
Mrs. Justice: Oh yes. You had to wait a long time. I thought we never would get it.
Interviewer: What did people in Oak Ridge do for entertainment during the early years when you didn’t have gasoline and couldn’t get in and out? Did they mostly just visit back and forth?
Mrs. Justice: There wasn’t much entertainment – there was just work for everybody. There wasn’t very much, didn’t have any country club. You didn’t have anything. Had a movie. That’s all we had. Just the movie – picture show. That’s all we had in Oak Ridge for entertainment. Only other recreation people could have was a party and invite people. But as far as going to things, there wasn’t anything to go to. And everybody worked. I tell you, that was a time that everybody worked.
Interviewer: Did even the women who had small children work during that time, the ones who were in Oak Ridge? Or were they just not allowed in?
Mrs. Justice: They could work if they could take care of their children. Anybody could get a job. ‘Cause there was just work for everybody. If they could arrange to have somebody take care of their children, they could get a job. Of course I didn’t have to have anybody – my children were big enough and they were in school while I worked, and then I was home.
Interviewer: That worked out very well.
Mrs. Justice: That worked out fine for me. I’d get home most of the time while they were at school.
Interviewer: Where did they go to school?
Mrs. Justice: They both graduated from the high school. My son started out, he was little…. Now my daughter was in her senior year when she came down here from Middlesboro. She was older, you see.
Interviewer: Then did your son go to any of the Oak Ridge elementary schools?
Mrs. Justice: Oh yes. He went to Pine Valley.
Interviewer: To Pine Valley?
Mrs. Justice: That’s off New York. That’s the first school he went to. Then the high school.
Interviewer: The high school then was, I guess…
Mrs. Justice: Up on the hill.
Interviewer: Up on the hill, where the old Jefferson was.
Mrs. Justice: Yes. They both graduated there. They didn’t have the new high school. That’s all they had. Then down at Robertsville, they had, what did they call that? Just the elementary. He never did, I don’t think he went down there. I guess he had to go down there too, after he got done with elementary, he was just about 10 years old. Then he went to junior high, and, that was junior high.
Interviewer: At Robertsville?
Mrs. Justice: Uh huh. Then up on the hill, where he graduated. They both graduated from the high school. The new one was almost completed when my son graduated. I think it was completed the next year. He didn’t get to use it, he was graduated.
Interviewer: Did you find that living costs went up a great deal? Do you think they went up more in Oak Ridge than they did all over the country? Of course they had gone up everywhere, but did you feel that they had gone up…?
Mrs. Justice: Do you mean back then?
Interviewer: Back then.
Mrs. Justice: No, I don’t think so. Everybody, if you lived in Oak Ridge, everybody thought that you had more money than anybody else. They always try to… They’d always hold Oak Ridge people up, because they knew they made good salaries. And they really socked it to them.
Interviewer: That may still be true.
Mrs. Justice: Yeah, oh that’s true, now, yes. They still think that. Oh he’s from Oak Ridge, he makes good money, just let him pay so-and-so.
Interviewer: Did you ever hear any funny stories about what they were making at the plants, or about people trying to get in or out through the gates, or anything like that?
Mrs. Justice: No, I don’t recall. I guess I don’t recall now. I was so busy with my work and my family that I didn’t do anything but work.
Interviewer: I’m sure you were.
Mrs. Justice: ‘Cause if you had family and then worked too. Why, I didn’t have time for foolishness. I didn’t hear anybody else either.
Interviewer: I don’t imagine you did.
Mrs. Justice: But I enjoyed the work. Everybody enjoyed the work. Everybody was happy and just going at a gallop. The streets were just streaming. I mean highways, whatever you called them. Everybody was just going just as hard as they could go, up and down the streets just all the time, just like that. Just a mad rush, certainly a mad rush.
Interviewer: Well, I think really having Oak Ridge come in…
Mrs. Justice: Well it was a wonderful thing, but these people wouldn’t accept it. Clinton fought Oak Ridge like a [?] and it has just made Clinton. It was just a wide place in the road. And, why they’ve spent money up there. It’s an asset to Clinton and they realize that now, but at first they resented Oak Ridgers.
Interviewer: I think there is still some resentment.
Mrs. Justice: Yes, there is. But it really, it certainly has improved. And every little town around here, Oliver Springs, and well, it’s just not ‘cause you can’t mention it, it has improved. Even in Marlow, a little quiet place in the road down here, still, it broadened it out. Every town and place that has a name was improved after Oak Ridge came here.
Interviewer: Are there a great many more people here in the surrounding area, places like Marlow now than there were before?
Mrs. Justice: Yes. A lot of them have left, you know. But a lot of people lived in Marlow, and they lived anywhere they could get. If they couldn’t get anywhere people slept on the ground. Until the houses were built, you know in tents and trailers. The doctors nearly all lived in a trailer.
Interviewer: Really! I hadn’t heard about that.
Mrs. Justice: Yes. Didn’t anybody have a house. ‘Cause where were they going to do until they got to building houses. They had to get a house built. Dr. Aiden [?] down here, I can mention several doctors that lived in trailers. And a lot of people slept on the ground. They slept anywhere in the summertime. Mrs. Boggs kept about 4 or 5 men here, ‘cause she had the room. Although Mr. Boggs liked to have a fit, but she did it anyhow. She just felt terrible having this big house and people lying around on the ground.
Interviewer: I can understand that.
Mrs. Justice: He was a bit selfish about that. He didn’t want anybody in the house. But she just overruled him on that. And she had, and she had a nice guy too. I think she had about 5. Had 2 bedrooms up here, with 3 in one room and two in the other, something like that. So she just overruled him on that, ‘cause she said she just couldn’t bear to see people lying around on the ground, and with those rooms vacant. Wasn’t a soul here, just the two of them. They didn’t have any children. It was selfish.
Interviewer: It was too much room for the two.
Mrs. Justice: And he was just thrilled to death after he knew them. They had more fun. A real nice man.
Interviewer: What did you like best about living in Oak Ridge? Was there any particular thing that you thought was different about it? Was it good living there behind the gates where you didn’t have magazine salesmen and people like that?
Mrs. Justice: That didn’t bother me. I don’t know what all I’d…. I just liked Oak Ridge. It is a nice place to live.
Interviewer: It’s a nice place to live.
Mrs. Justice: I like it. I always liked it. Although I was asked, I guess, I didn’t resent coming. I liked to never got my husband down here. He thought, like everybody else, it was a big bubble that would burst. It wouldn’t amount to anything and he wasn’t going to give up the job he had to come down here and maybe the thing last a short time and then just not have any job. I kept telling him what a good thing it was and how it was growing and all, and he couldn’t see it. He didn’t come down very often and of course I visited a lot, see, this was home. I’d come down, the children and I, and he never did come with us much. Finally, I got him down here and he saw what it was and I just had to just almost drag him down here. It was the best move he ever made. He had a good job, it was much better than what he made up there. It ended up he had a good job: he was manager of the cafeteria down at X-10. It was a good move for us because he wasn’t making very much where he was. Didn’t anybody make very much working at places like that there, because they didn’t have the salary that they did in Oak Ridge. They didn’t pay so much in the beginning, but it kept going up, going up, going up all the time. [pause] I think you’ve gotten about all the information you can get out of me.
Interviewer: I was just looking to see if I had any more questions on my list to ask, and I believe we’ve pretty much covered everything. I would like to take a picture of your house, and I’d like to get one of you and Mr. Justice too if we can.
Mrs. Justice: Can you take it in the house?
Interviewer: If we can get a place where there is a fair amount of light. I might as well turn this off.
[end of recording]

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ORAL HISTORY OF JAMES REAGAN JUSTICE AND
MARGUERITE STAPLES JUSTICE
Interviewed by Sibyl Nestor
November 19, 1973
Interviewer: If you would tell me where you were born and brought up and tell me your name first, so we’ll have that at the very beginning of the tape.
Mr. Justice: J.R. Justice.
Interviewer: And you said you were from Prudden, Tennessee?
Mr. Justice: No, I was born in Shenoa, Kentucky. My father was a civil mining engineer. We moved from there to Holston, Kentucky. Holston, Kentucky to Jellico, Tennessee but I was raised up in Williamsburg, Kentucky…essentially during the period, from say, about the time I was about 10 years old on up, ‘till I was about 20 or 21. I went to school there at Cumberland College. Then went into business school in Cincinnati, Ohio and was also at Knoxville Business College in Knoxville, Tennessee. And went from there to Hamilton National Bank, Hamilton National Bank to Prudden Coal Company. I worked for the Prudden Coal Company for about 10 years, went into the grocery business in Williamsburg, Kentucky and after there, I went back to the Prudden Coal Company about 1940 and ‘41. Worked there until Oak Ridge opened up and jobs became available down here so I quit up there and came got a job down here. First worked for Tennessee Eastman, Tennessee Eastman down to H.D. Ferguson got me; then over to Oak Ridge National Lab. Worked there 20 years. Retired in ‘65.
Interviewer: And you said you were an engineer?
Mr. Justice: My father was.
Interviewer: Oh, your father was an engineer?
Mr. Justice: Civil mining engineer, brother was a civil mining engineer.
Interviewer: I see. I just misunderstood. I thought that what you were saying was that you were a businessman rather than an engineer.
Mr. Justice: Oh yes.
Interviewer: What sort of work did you do at Tennessee Eastman when you first came?
Mr. Justice: Well I was in charge of order receiving at the cafeteria. At H.D. Ferguson Company I was a purchasing agent for them, for the cafeteria. And then I went down to X-10 as a purchasing agent for them in the cafeteria. And then I was assistant manager for a while and then after Carbide took over, I was in charge of ordering and receiving, and finally became cafeteria manager.
Interviewer: So you were involved in feeding all these multitudes of people, when there were so many in Oak Ridge?
Mr. Justice: That’s right. Of course many of the meals served were in Y-12, I was there in the cafeteria.
Interviewer: Well that must have required a lot of food at a time when there was…?
Mr. Justice: It sure did. They brought potatoes by the car load. We had all kinds of storage room there, of course. We brought meat by the car load, we brought produce by the truck load and we brought potatoes by the car load. We had an enormous amount food. At that time there was 700, when I left there was 700 employees in the cafeteria alone.
Interviewer: In the cafeteria alone?
Mr. Justice: That’s right. 700 employees. See they had a lot of these baby cafeterias scattered around the plant, in addition to the two main cafeterias. Had one at 9711-1 and 9711-5, those two buildings were cafeterias. One was in the east end of Y-12, the other was about mid-way down. The plant runs east and west. The one at “-5” was a new one they built after I worked there. They build it in the plant area. I left the cafeteria where I first went to work and went down there, and worked at “-5”.
Interviewer: Did you have problems obtaining food during wartime when things were so scarce?
Mr. Justice: Well, yes. We of course had just so many food stamps allotted to us. We had to keep within the amount that was allotted to us and within that, we had to serve as many fresh vegetables as we could, fresh vegetables and canned vegetables. And of course meat was very hard to obtain. They would have these carloads of meat set up, where you would get so much luncheon meat and along with that you would get so much beef and so much pork. Since you had to buy so much other stuff along with it in order to get this beef and pork. Made menus very hard to write or very hard to figure out.
Interviewer: I’m sure that’s true. And all this food came in by train, into the area, or did you get some of it on a truck?
Mr. Justice: The great majority of came by truck. Shipped all these goods by truck. We got produce out of Atlanta; we got produce out of Chicago.
Interviewer: Feeding all those people must have been a big job. Now, did you serve just the main meal in the middle of the day or did you serve…?
Mr. Justice: We served meals around the clock.
Interviewer: …round the clock?
Mr. Justice: …24 hours a day.
Interviewer: Because there were so many shifts…?
Mr. Justice: There were three shifts. We had three shifts in the cafeteria. We were in operation there 24 hours a day. 8,000 people in these shifts. Of course that was right in the heyday of Y-12. Construction workers alone there was 1,000’s of them… The best I can remember there were restrictions on them eating in the cafeteria. They couldn’t eat in the cafeterias. Only employees of Tennessee Eastman could eat there. And of course AEC employees. At the canteens I think, they could slip in, the construction workers could order at the canteens.
Interviewer: And the people had ration stamps at home. You probably had more people eating there than would have been otherwise.
Mr. Justice: That’s right. So many people you know, it depended on where people lived, people stayed in dormitories and their families weren’t here and they had to eat at the cafeterias.
Interviewer: Now when you came here, did you come to this house, or did you live in the Oak Ridge area?
Mr. Justice: Yes we lived here until a house became available in Oak Ridge. We lived here 3 or 4 months, something like that, before we could get a house in Oak Ridge. On Parker Road to start with.
Interviewer: That’s off Pennsylvania?
Mr. Justice: That’s right. It was right there on the corner: 101 Parker Road. And then we got a ‘C’ house, and we moved up there just this side of ???? Road, off one of the streets there. We lived up there until Mr. Boggs died. Mr. and Mrs. Boggs lived here you see, my wife’s maiden name. And when he died we said that this became available and let’s move over here with her. She was living by herself. We moved over here. (??)
Interviewer: And did you move out here before they had the gates open, or was it not until after they opened the gates?
Mr. Justice: Well, we moved out here after, out here after the war was over.
Interviewer: So you didn’t have to have a pass to get in and out then?
Mr. Justice: So we moved out here in, I believe he died in the year the war was over. We moved out here after the gates were open. He died in August of ’45 I believe. Yes, that’s when it was, August ’45; the war was over in ’45. By that time I was working at X-10 (??)
Interviewer: When the war was over, and so many people left fairly shortly, did this make a great deal of difference in the cafeteria operations?
Mr. Justice: Sure.
Interviewer: Right away?
Mr. Justice: The place where I was, I was at X-10 then, I don’t think it affected everybody at that time. X-10 was a small place, the smallest one of any of them, very small. It didn’t compare, of course, to Y-12 or K-25, either one. Eventually it became one of the largest, one of the largest cafeterias in volume.
Interviewer: I did not know anything about the relative size of the plants.
Mr. Justice: As far as the size of the plants is concerned, of course, X-10 is scattered all over creation out there. They placed stuff everywhere out there. As far as acreage covered, I don’t know. I guess Y-12, Y-12 or K-25 as far as acreage is involved, is about the largest.
Interviewer: I was thinking in terms of the size, as the number of employees when I said size. I think Y-12 is not as large as K-25 now, but during the war it was much larger. Is that …?
Mr. Justice: Well…
Interviewer: Is it that they didn’t do as much shift work?
Mr. Justice: I really don’t know too much about K-25. I’d say you’d be about right about that: Y-12 had more employees than K-25. I guess so. I know they do have now. X-10 has got Biology, which is associated with X-10 and of course is located at Y-12. And they’re counted in as employees of X-10 and that’s quite a large operation and staff. At one time X-10 operated a canteen over there for the Biology Department. But they got away from that.
Interviewer: Well, when you actually lived in Oak Ridge, during the war years, was inconvenient to be behind the gates? Did you find this to be …?
Mr. Justice: No, not particularly.
Interviewer: Where did you do your personal shopping, the food that your wife served at home, and your clothing, and this kind of thing?
Mr. Justice: We did it in Oak Ridge.
Interviewer: You did in Oak Ridge. During those years, when we came to Oak Ridge, the Jackson Square area was the only shopping center, which was really operating beyond the small neighborhood grocery stores, places like Elm Grove and Pine Valley, places like that. Was there more shopping for clothes and things like that during the war years or was there just the Loveman’s Store that was there then?
Mr. Justice: Now, what?
Interviewer: There was a Loveman’s Store, in Jackson Square, was that the only place to buy department store goods?
Mr. Justice: Well I guess it was.
Interviewer: But I guess your wife would have done this more than you, so she knew a bit more…
Mr. Justice: Of course we, a lot of times we wouldn’t go to places like that, we would go into Knoxville. Grocery shopping, of course we did all that in Oak Ridge. We did other shopping in Knoxville, for clothes and things like that. In fact, we didn’t even have an ???? we got Miller’s, and Loveman’s and Hall’s.
Interviewer: In the years we’ve been here, that’s been one of the greatest changes in Oak Ridge, the greater availability of shopping.
Mr. Justice: That’s right. It’s become a shopping center for the whole area now, this part of the country at least. The sales tax is one thing, the sales tax in Oak Ridge compared to Knoxville. It’s a lot more convenient …???? it’s a lot easier getting into Oak Ridge compared to Knoxville.
Interviewer: Do you farm this land here? Have you done that since you lived out here?
Mr. Justice: No, I never did farm it until after I retired. Oh, I think one year here I planted a garden out there, but I was too busy working to tend to a garden. I have always liked to do it but just didn’t take the time to do it. Always thought I’d start in on it when I retired, had to have something to do. I plowed everything around her I could plow.
Interviewer: How long have you been coming to the Farmer’s Market?
Mr. Justice: Since, I’d say about ’66, 1966. 1965 was the year I retired, I think I started in ’66. I did that through, now see what was that name up here above Clinton, old man, do you remember him? Bridges, that right. He was influential in finally talking me into it. He was influential in getting me to come over. I didn’t raise any quandary or anything… I saw what I could do. In all I raise everything I can raise here.
Interviewer: Do you know many of the people who were here during the …
Mr. Justice: … the early years…
Interviewer: …during the early years? Do you have neighbors, for example, have you heard people talk about how they felt about Oak Ridge coming in? Did the people, were they enthusiastic about it? Or did they feel negative about it?
Mr. Justice: Well, it really all depended on whether they worked in Oak Ridge or not. Whether they had a job over there or not. Those who didn’t have a job, they weren’t too enthusiastic about it. I know I do a little bird hunting, here and there, up toward, up in Morgan County and on up in there. I’d do a little bird hunting and there was quite a bit of resentment up there, against the Oak Ridgers, you know, because so many of them would come up there and hunt without permission and things like that. It’s one of the times having an Anderson County license on your car wasn’t too popular. Someone was asked if he had a license and they’d said “no”, no license to hunt. Of course that probably wasn’t true about all of them, but some of them were used to just hunting anywhere they wanted to and they went on people’s land without asking about it. Of course it created some resentment against Anderson County. It could have happened, not to Oak Ridgers, but people outside of Oak Ridge for that matter. Of course this became a whole lot more thickly populated, more people worked in Oak Ridge and lived in Anderson County, outside of Oak Ridge. There were people who would hunt on people’s land, and not ask to hunt at all, it doesn’t matter if they were from Oak Ridge or Anderson County.
Interviewer: Anytime you have an influx of people from outside, you’re going to get some people who will give everybody a bad name.
Mr. Justice: That’s right.
Interviewer: Do you feel that having Oak Ridge here has increased the prosperity of this area?
Mr. Justice: Oh absolutely. It’s made this part of the country. It sure has.
Interviewer: What are the biggest differences that you see between when you visited before and …?
Mr. Justice: Before there wasn’t anything here except farms. That’s all there was.
Interviewer: So that was all anybody did, was farm?
Mr. Justice: With the exception, of course of Anderson Mills here in Clinton, which is closed down. There were no manufacturing plants at all. Of course you get jobs in there, either up there or farm, one or the other.
Interviewer: Is that Magnet Mills?
Mr. Justice: Magnet Mills, in Clinton.
Interviewer: And they made hosiery?
Mr. Justice: That’s right. And they employed, I don’t know what, at least 600, 700, 800 people in there.
Interviewer: But that was the only industry?
Mr. Justice: That was the only industry at all in this part of the country. Of course there would be as many people, I guess, that worked in Knoxville and then went back to the farms from Anderson County as lived in Knoxville. As far as anything in the neighborhood here, there was no employment whatever except maybe…?? or working on a farm, or coal mining. Of course no coal mining in Anderson County to speak of. (??) There is no question about it that Oak Ridge has made Anderson County, and Roane County and all the surrounding counties here. If you were close enough to where you could commute as far as to Oak Ridge.
Interviewer: What did the people think that was being made in Oak Ridge when it first came in?
Mr. Justice: Well, they hadn’t the slightest idea. As far as I was personally concerned, it didn’t interest me one way or the other. I mean, I didn’t even think about it. All I was interested in was a job and I didn’t have any curiosity about it whatever. Of course, I had no curiosity in one way, in that, it didn’t worry me at all. I knew, I didn’t ask any questions about anything.
Interviewer: Well, I’m from Middle Tennessee and people down there used to make quaint speculations. Like, one of the things that people said was that they were making campaign buttons for FDR. [laugh] I wondered if you had heard any stories like that?
Mr. Justice: No. The thing is, you see, they’d see these trains loaded with something going in to Oak Ridge your know, the train carrying this load and nothing coming out. They couldn’t figure it, they couldn’t figure it. They didn’t have any manufacturing or anything over there. There wouldn’t be anything coming out. So they just couldn’t figure it out. That’s the thing about it, that’s the thing I heard, more than anything else, what in the world could they be making when they weren’t shipping anything out of there. Everything was going in and nothing coming out. [laugh] And of course, there were people who thought they people in Oak Ridge got a whole lot more food, and with rationing and all and everything they figured they were being preferentially treated. They had a lot of things given to them, of course, people outside of Oak Ridge couldn’t get. There was really resentment about that.
Interviewer: Do you feel there was any basis for truth in this or was it just how people felt?
Mr. Justice: Well, I don’t think there was any question but what the people in Oak Ridge, as far as the cafeterias and cigarettes and things like that, they were able to get more than the people outside. I guess because they had to keep people happy. There was a lot of turnover that forced a lot of those people, you know, either it’s a question of working out there or going in to the army, one.
Interviewer: Of course, they had to have preferential treatment as far as construction materials, because there was no place for those people to live.
Mr. Justice: That’s right. That’s right. I know as far as personally, as far as food stamps are concerned, gasoline stamps, things like that, I guess…. Well, of course, there were those people that worked in there that lived outside. Oak Ridge couldn’t possibly take care of, you know, the housing situation over there. There were people from outside that worked there and of course they had to get back in cars. And they had a good many buses, even the taxis. An awful lot of private cars on the road, too. And they needed gasoline. They only got it through the fact that they had to get that to get to work.
Interviewer: So they weren’t much ahead.
Mr. Justice: No.
Interviewer: They had to have more to use.
Mr. Justice: That’s right. But, a lot of people just thought that they were getting more than outside people could get. What year did you come to Oak Ridge?
Interviewer: We came in 1953. So we’ve been here a good while but we don’t remember the real early days.
Mr. Justice: I came in ’43.
Interviewer: Do you remember the mud: The boardwalks?
Mr. Justice: No, I don’t ..(?)..
Interviewer: No, I mean do you remember, they tell us many stories about the…
Mr. Justice: Oh, the mud! I thought you meant… I had something else in my mind when you said that. Oh yes, I assure you. In Knoxville, you know, they could tell an Oak Ridger by his shoes: he’d have mud all over them – they could tell whether you were from Oak Ridge or not. They used to be able to identify you even with sidewalks. When I came to Oak Ridge, Y-12 was rather muddy. I never saw so much mud as that in my life. That was the worst mud ever. And they had thousands and thousands of loads of gravel in there and it’d just sink out of sight. It was built right in a swamp. [noise] Can’t hear because of the traffic coming from Y-12. It was awful.
Interviewer: The mud is one of the things people like to tell stories about; and nearly everybody seems to have some sort of humorous stories about the problems of getting in and out through the locked gates.
Mr. Justice: That’s right.
Interviewer: Did you ever have anything funny happen to you?
Mr. Justice: No. I never did. I never did have anything happen to me at all. The main thing, of course, many of them tried to take whiskey into Oak Ridge.
Interviewer: Really?
Mr. Justice: That was the main thing, back in those days, to try to get whiskey through the gate. And those people, they want to have whiskey in one way or the other. And they were confiscating that whiskey, you know. If they caught you with whiskey, they’d search your car. And you never knew when they were going to search it. Sometimes you would go through and they never would search you, and other times they would. And, so, many of them got caught. And many a car had their whiskey removed and why, I understand, maybe, 15, 20, 30, 40, 50 dollars of whiskey, and they find a case of whiskey in there, and they’d come through and they’d search you and they’d lose it. It’d cost you. Oh when that happened, it was thousands of gallons of whiskey got caught.
Interviewer: I wonder what they did with it?
Mr. Justice: Yeah, that’s what I was wondering. [laugh] There used to be a rumor out, you know, that the AEC, of course, the Army you know, was in charge over there, that they never ran out of whiskey over there that with the Army officers and everything, they always got all the whiskey they wanted free. The lieutenants, and captains and majors and lieutenant colonels and everything else in there.
Interviewer: I’m sure there certainly were a lot of high-ranking officers. It was a very important project. Did your wife’s people, the Boggs, did they lose any of their land when they brought the construction in?
Mr. Justice: Yes. Yes. In this section, they owned about 410 acres you see, at that time, across the road, over here they owned that. You know where the big spring is down here they owned all that.
Interviewer: Key Springs?
Mr. Justice: Yeah, they owned that down there, and the road where the big spring is and down below it, of course, that went over into Oak Ridge.
Interviewer: A big spring like that was valuable property in those days too.
Mr. Justice: That’s right. It’s really valuable now. With Oliver Springs using the spring now it wouldn’t supply any water. Yes, they lost… I don’t know how much land they lost. My wife could tell better than I can. I don’t know how much land there was. They had 400 and some odd acres here to start with. Of course, they sold off some before the war. They sold this off to ?Wishburn? over here, across the railroad track over here, where the Kile place is now. They sold Dr. Kile his place here across and over to where Dr. Kile lives. And up on the hill, they had land up there on the hill. That’s all sold off. And over here, next to the river, you know, that strip of land up there where that beer place is, up there. You know that strip of land right in there, and that was sold off. And, of course, Oak Ridge wouldn’t take that. TVA took this piece over here.
Interviewer: This area had a lot of land taken, what with TVA and …
Mr. Justice: That’s right.
Interviewer: One of the people I talked to said that they knew someone who had had their land taken when they built the Smoky Mountains Park. And, then they bought land in Norris, or where Norris Lake is, not in Norris, but where Norris Lake is and that had been taken. And so then, they had come over here to Oak Ridge, where they thought couldn’t find them, and by-golly they came along and took it too. I understand there was a good deal of resentment about this, particularly in people who had been run off the second and third time.
Mr. Justice: Well, so many times they don’t think they received enough compensation for it. And probably they didn’t some of them. I don’t know. As far as Mr. Boggs is concerned, I don’t think he and the land he lost down there, he didn’t get everything.
Interviewer: Did it cause any sort of an economic slump in the area around Oak Ridge when so many people left after Oak Ridge – How many people were there – 60,000 people, at one point?
Mr. Justice: I really don’t know.
Interviewer: There was a tremendous number of people here.
Mr. Justice: There were an awful lot of people, no question about it.
Interviewer: And when the war was over, a lot of people left because they cut down the operation so much. Did this cause any sort of an economic slump in this area?
Mr. Justice: Oh, yeah. Sure. Sure did.
Interviewer: Who was hit the worst: Would it have been the merchants or the …?
Mr. Justice: Well I guess business in general. ‘Course the more of those people you know, came from outside. They just went back to where they were working to start with, I guess. Lloyd Hickey(?) was down here from Middleburg and that area, a 100 miles away. That fella just went back home and I haven’t seen him. The majority of the wages from Oak Ridge …?… And I say in the radius here of 100 miles, this caused an economic slump. Would not be at all surprised if that happened.
Interviewer: And I guess there were people who were laid off the jobs there who lived there, as well as change in the amount of money people were spending, when there were that many people here. What did you, how did you feel when they exploded the atomic bomb, and you found out what they had really been doing in Oak Ridge?
Mr. Justice: Well, I just couldn’t conceive of the thing. I read everything in the newspapers coming out, I read everything in the world I could about it. You know, you expect to hear answers, you know, to tell you the truth. Of course, being in the cafeteria, and, of course someone who’s working in the plants as well, and they seemed a whole lot more interested than I did. I was only interested as a businessman, that’s all I cared anything about. But it sure was a surprise to me. I’ll tell you… It’s hard for anyone to visualize what kind of a thing it is, what it is, whether you were a scientist and understand the things involved in it. I don’t know about everybody.
Interviewer: Well, I think people were stunned all over the country by this. I was still in junior high school and I don’t think I had any conception of what it really meant. Of the difference it was going to make in the history of this country, really.
Mr. Justice: True.
Interviewer: Because, it was sort of a watershed in a lot of ways, when they first exploded that bomb.
Mr. Justice: We’re saying we’re ahead because we got it first. That’s the best thing. If Germany had gotten it, then we wouldn’t be here today, I don’t guess.
Interviewer: Circumstances would be very different now, I think.
Mr. Justice: They were the ones saying they were on to it, you know. We just beat them to it, that’s all.
Interviewer: Did you have children living with you during your time you lived in Oak Ridge?
Mr. Justice: Oh yes. Of course, both my boy and girl graduated from Oak Ridge High School.
Interviewer: Where are they living now?
Mr. Justice: My son is a lawyer in Knoxville and my daughter is living in Virginia Beach, Virginia. She’s married, my son is not married, and I have two grandchildren.
Interviewer: It’s nice that they are not so terribly far away.
Mr. Justice: No.
Interviewer: How did your kids feel about Oak Ridge?
Mr. Justice: They’re crazy about it, crazy about it.
Interviewer: And they liked going to school there?
Mr. Justice: Well they sure did. In fact, after we moved out of here, my daughter kept an apartment there in Oak Ridge. She was, at that time, working at the plant, and she kept an apartment there in Oak Ridge so that Jim, my son, could still go to school in Oak Ridge. He was younger than she was. And so, he could continue going and graduate from the high school in Oak Ridge. If he moved out here, he wasn’t eligible to attend school in Oak Ridge. But she kept this apartment there so he could go to school in Oak Ridge and finish up there.
Interviewer: It must have been interesting to go to school here, in those years. There were so many young people.
Mr. Justice: That’s right. …?…
Interviewer: When they went, did they ever talk about, did people seemed to take a different attitude toward them, because they had been to Oak Ridge, did they ever feel that this was… I don’t know quite how to phrase my question. Did they ever feel that they were sort of a curiosity, because they lived in Oak Ridge?
Mr. Justice: Hmm, I couldn’t say. No, I don’t think so. Of course, I guess they were subject to a lot of questions everywhere they went, in the early days. I don’t know.
Interviewer: Were there any things you particularly liked about living in Oak Ridge, or that you particularly disliked?
Mr. Justice: There’s nothing I disliked about it at all. I liked Oak Ridge. Oak Ridge is one of the most modern cities in the country. Everything is laid out just the way it should be. I liked Oak Ridge very much.
Interviewer: It was easier to find things then than it is now since it has expanded. There are ‘C’ streets in other areas.
Mr. Justice: Yes, that’s true. All those housing developments in Oak Ridge. Of course it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack, when you try to find a place there. The main part of Oak Ridge was built during the war, everyone can find their way around. But, in the other parts, it’s whatever; I wouldn’t know how to start to find someone in. The streets were all laid out, you know, and all of them started with the same letter, and the side streets. And then the way they built the streets, you know, the children were all; you know, the circles, all kept away from the traffic. You could raise a family without any danger of getting run over in traffic or anything like that, with young children, back in those side streets. Certainly well laid out, I tell you that. I guess that’s not true however, with the parts, the housing and all after Oak Ridge, after the war.
Interviewer: They have done pretty well. But of course it’s not done in a systematic way, that was done when the whole original part of the city was built.
Mr. Justice: Anything you do with the idea of making money, anything that was laid out the other way.
Interviewer: Wee, is there anything… I have asked all my questions. Is there anything you would like to add from your point of view as a businessman and long-time resident, that you think would be good, that I haven’t asked yet?
Mr. Justice: I think it is one of the best places in the country to live, certainly right in this vicinity. I have no grand desire, to live anywhere else. I feel after I retired, some people saying, if I’d wanted to live someplace else, I’d have moved there. I didn’t course, we live here in this house and …(?) If I’d had my choice, there isn’t anywhere else I like to be, other that right here. Sure enough. Every kind of recreational opportunity here you can possibly have anyway: fishing, hunting, about anything you’re looking for. Sure happy with it.
Interviewer: I thing a lot of people came in from further off, and have become very attached to it, and I know we have.
Mr. Justice: Quite a number of people I’ve talked to, who have come here from different sections of the country say this is, this is God’s country here. They’re crazy about it. There was this lady down here yesterday, I believe she was here from the state of Washington. And, she said she’d been here about four years, something like that, she was some kind of advisor connected to X-10 or somewhere, and she said that she was staying.
Interviewer: It’s a good place. Unless you have something else you’d like to talk about, I might talk to Mrs. Justice then.
[Side 1, part 2]
ORAL HISTORY OF MARGUERITE STAPLES JUSTICE
Interviewer: Now, to start, if you would tell me about the house, I understand
you were born here, and what your name is now, and what your maiden name was, and maybe a bit about your family that lived here.
Mrs. Justice: I was born right here in this house. Well, this was Dossett at that time and I was born here. My mother died when I was about 18 months old. My grandparents took me and so I lived on here, and my little brother. I stayed here until I married. Well I worked, I worked around everyplace: I was with the railroad some, different jobs that I had at Prudden Coal Company. When I married I really left, I didn’t really leave this place until I married.
Interviewer: What sort of work did you do?
Mrs. Justice: I was an operator for the L&N Railroad. Then I was a secretary at Prudden Coal Company.
Interviewer: That must have been an interesting thing to do.
Mrs. Justice: Yes it was, very interesting. Mr. Griffin, Charlie Griffin, up at Prudden, he was the President of the mines at that time and general manager.
Interviewer: And then when you married….
Mrs. Justice: I married; I met my husband in Prudden, when I went to Prudden to work. We were both; I was in the office and he was in the store. So that’s where we met.
Interviewer: And then were your children born in Kentucky or were they…?
Mrs. Justice: My children, we lived in mining camps. See Prudden is a mining camp.
Interviewer: I see.
Mrs. Justice: We didn’t have any children for about 2 years. And after two years we had a daughter. We then went to Yellow Creek, which is still owned by the Prudden Coal Company. My husband was managing the store and I had the office. Now that was before I had any children. After I had children, I didn’t work. Both my children… My daughter was born in Knoxville because, at that time, they didn’t have room down at Prudden and it was dangerous to stay up there. So I came to Knoxville, ‘cause I was coming to the hospital there, came down three weeks before she was born, and then we went back up and lived at Yellow Creek, which was owned by the Prudden Coal Company. Then after five and half years, I had a son. He was born, up, by that time, we had a road across the mountain to Middlesboro. He was born in the hospital in Middlesboro.
Interviewer: That was a lot easier for you.
Mrs. Justice: Very much. Well I waited there 3 weeks. I was afraid to wait to the last minute because it took too long to come.
Interviewer: Now did you tell me your name?
Mrs. Justice: I didn’t tell you my name. I was Marguerite Staples.
Interviewer: Marguerite Staples.
Mrs. Justice: That was my maiden name. My mother was Blanche Cross. She married William Staples.
Interviewer: Was it the Staples family that had this house?
Mrs. Justice: No, Cross. My grandfather’s name was Joe Black Cross, J.B. Cross. This was his home. He started housekeeping here. My mother was born here. Every child he had was born here. He stayed here until he died and my grandmother died here too. After my grandfather died, Ada (?) Boggs, my mothers’ sister, her husband bought the farm. Well this was still home to me, so I stayed on here. This was the home I’d come in the war to, I worked too at that time, but this was always home. I’d come back. ‘Course now I’m getting the cart before the horse, because I’m telling about, then after I got married, you see. After I was an operator on the L&N Railroad. That was copying train orders and things like that and checking on the trains to run.
Interviewer: Maybe you could tell me a little about the Cross family. This is certainly one of the handsomest houses in this part of Tennessee. I would like to know a little about, little more about it’s history and about the Cross family. Your husband said that originally there were 450 acres.
Mrs. Justice: No, around 500 I guess. I don’t know. There was quite a bit of land, all around. In Oak Ridge – you’ve not ready for that yet are you?
Interviewer: Well, it’s real important. And I’d like to hear….
Mrs. Justice: When Oak Ridge came here, they took the Bacon Springs. They took that. That’s all part of the farm they took. In ’45, my uncle, which is Boggs, who had bought the place, died. His wife… They didn’t have any children. She’s my mother’s sister, and she couldn’t get anybody to stay with her. I came over. We moved over here in about ’47. I had two children and we were living in Oak Ridge. We had moved from Yellow Creek or Prudden to here. Then I took care of her for 20 years. She’s in a rest home down in Oak Ridge now; she’s 92.
Interviewer: You mentioned her when were talking on the phone. Did you know many of the people who lived in what is now the Oak Ridge area? Did you visit back and forth?
Mrs. Justice: I knew everybody. I knew all that farmed this section. The McKameys, Peake… I’m trying to think of that man’s name. It was just after I came. But they all just had a fit when they took their farms. Every one of them resented it. Especially one man, I was reading that he’d sued. He just wouldn’t give up at all. He almost cracked up over it. Of course, didn’t anybody like the idea. Well, they didn’t know what it was, and it just looked like somebody was coming in and just taking over their place where they’d lived all of their lives. And there wasn’t so very many farmers out here, I think, we just had the farm down there, and there were very few, very few. All spread out, you know.
Interviewer: Do you remember the name of the family that lived where the big spring is, where the Oak Ridge swimming pool is now?
Mrs. Justice: Oh yes. That was cousin Ethel. My cousin Ethel Cross.
Interviewer: Oh so she [sic] was actually some of your family.
Mrs. Justice: Oh yes. And that was his home place. His father and my grandfather had the same name: Joe Black Cross. They called the one in Oak Ridge… “Robertsville”, that was the name of the little place, “Robertsville Joe”. And my grandfather, “Black Oak Ridge Joe”. Just to separate them. They were double first cousins, I think. They both had the same name.
Interviewer: I guess they were probably named after the same person. Did you go to school?
Mrs. Justice: I went to school in the country school, that was just tiny, a country school down here.
Interviewer: Was it in the Oak Ridge area?
Mrs. Justice: No, Dossett. It’s gone now.
Interviewer: Down here by the railroad station?
Mrs. Justice: Yes. And I went to Winchester, Tennessee to school, and I wound up in Knoxville. I finished my education which was [laugh] in Knoxville. Those are the only places I ever been to school: Winchester and Knoxville. I was over there two different times. I was over there when I was small and then when I got in high school.
Interviewer: You were talking about how the people felt when the land was taken over. What sort of justification was made to them for taking it over?
Mrs. Justice: Well I don’t know. I don’t remember about that so much now. But they didn’t think they had gotten enough for it.
Interviewer: They didn’t feel they’d got enough money?
Mrs. Justice: No they didn’t think they’d got enough money and they didn’t want to give it up in any case.
Interviewer: Well, I’m sure of that.
Mrs. Justice: That was home and …
Interviewer: Did most of them find places in the area, or did a good many of them leave?
Mrs. Justice: No, they left. Copelands had a home there, you know this brick house as you come out to Elza Gate? That was their house and they had to give it up. Clark Lee [?] lives down there, he had a little farm. And the Peaks, the Cables [?]. But they owned big farms, so they covered quite a bit of territory. So, there weren’t too many farms down there because by the time they, this was a big territory, why, they took it all up, you see. Of course there were little farms too.
Interviewer: Well, I’ve noticed that there seem to be a lot of small cemeteries around Oak Ridge.
Mrs. Justice: Well everybody had their cemetery on their farm in those days, because there wasn’t a cemetery around here. And there are plots everywhere. Now the Gambles, that’s who I was trying to think of a while ago, now he just, he just really went off the deep when they took his place. And that little cemetery back over there near Kern’s Methodist Church, now his house was this side, down on the Turnpike, where those big, there are some big trees, or was, I didn’t know if there is now or not. Now that was their home. But, he just literally got his gun and said he’d just dared anyone to come in here and take his. Of course, they did take it. He was very unhappy. Gamble, Oscar Gamble was his name. He fought hard.
Interviewer: There is a section in Oak Ridge now which is known as Gamble Valley.
Mrs. Justice: Yes.
Interviewer: It is known as Scarboro. I wonder, I guess this was named after his family.
Mrs. Justice: I guess it was. I’m almost sure it was. Because there is a lot of Gambles down there.
Interviewer: This man, Mr. Gamble, I guess there just really wasn’t much he could do but leave.
Mrs. Justice: No they couldn’t. He couldn’t do anything about it. They took it.
Interviewer: There is not any way to fight the government.
Mrs. Justice: They took it. You can’t fight the government. Now, he certainly tried.
Interviewer: Do you think the people who left are resigned now?
Mrs. Justice: Why, yes. Most of them are gone, dead.
Interviewer: Well, it’s been a long time.
Mrs. Justice: It’s been a long time. And these people were older anyway.
Interviewer: It breaks old people’s heart to have to leave their place.
Mrs. Justice: Yes. Well, they’d been living there. That had been their home for years and years and years. You can see why they just – to have somebody come in and take their home over. Say “get out”. I can imagine how they’d feel.
Interviewer: I can imagine. I really can. If someone came in and said they were going to take my house, I would be very upset. Well, I’m glad that this one wasn’t taken. That it was on the edge. Because it is such a beautiful place.
Mrs. Justice: It could have been, too. I tell you. Bacon Springs down here was part of the farm. They took that. Of course Mr. and Mrs. Boggs, they were up in the air about it. They didn’t like it one bit. And they didn’t like the Oak Ridge people on account of that. And there is nobody around here that like the Oak Ridge people just because of that. They just took a dislike to them, and have their mouths set. Because of the Oak Ridgers, they always had something sly to say about them. But you can see why they feel that way. Because it just looked like robbery. They came in, taking possession when they shouldn’t do it.
Interviewer: Mr. Wells, the editor of the Clinton Courier, I talked to him. He said that the land acquisition in Oak Ridge was not nearly as well handled as it was for Norris Lake.
Mrs. Justice: I don’t think so either.
Interviewer: He felt that they had local people do that, and they had a little more time to do it in. And therefore, there wasn’t as much resentment as there was in Oak Ridge.
Mrs. Justice: I don’t think there was quite as much resentment in Norris. Although those people were terribly upset. But, I don’t think there is as much as Oak Ridge, because they took in so much territory, a lot more territory. 56,000 acres isn’t it?
Interviewer: Well, of course, I don’t know how much land the lake covers.
Mrs. Justice: I don’t either. …it goes way down.
Interviewer: The Oak Ridge reservation is really a very large area.
Mrs. Justice: I think it is 56,000 acres.
Interviewer: I don’t really know how much land they took.
Mrs. Justice: And the Daughters [?] That’s all the way down to Wheat. See they took all that section.
Interviewer: Now, Wheat is where K-25 is. Is that right?
Mrs. Justice: Yes. That’s where the Daughter [?] farm was. Now I wasn’t too familiar with those people. They’re in the family most too, but that was farther away, and we didn’t… I wasn’t down in there much. I just knew about the families close to me.
Interviewer: You lived in Oak Ridge during a good part of the war?
Mrs. Justice: Yes, my husband worked at the plant, and my children went to school in Oak Ridge. Both of them graduated from Oak Ridge. And then of course my son went away to college. My daughter went to Business College. I’ll tell about my family. He is an attorney in Knoxville and she did secretary work. She had a good job down in Oak Ridge.
Interviewer: You are the first woman that I have talked to, and real glad to be able to sort of get a woman’s voice.
Mrs. Justice: Well I’m just a native. I just know the things (?). Having been born and reared here, knowing all the old families, why I just remember all about what a ruckus it was.
Interviewer: Do you remember any interesting stories about the ruckus?
Mrs. Justice: No, nothing more than the Gamble man. He’s the one that raised such a big ruckus. He got his shotgun and just laid around just waiting for someone to come see him. He was going to blow their brains out. But they got him to quiet down. He really went off.
Interviewer: If somebody was coming to take your land it…
Mrs. Justice: He just went crazy. It just upset him to no end. But I don’t know of anybody else who had any trouble. He’s the only one that absolutely refused.
Interviewer: I used to know a man who’s name was Diggs.
Mrs. Justice: Oh, he lives right down here. He raised his farm here for years and years.
Interviewer: Is he still living?
Mrs. Justice: Yes.
Interviewer: Well he used to…
Mrs. Justice: Alvin Diggs.
Interviewer: Yes. He used to bring me eggs years ago. And was one of the people I had thought about talking to but I wasn’t able to get in touch with him.
Mrs. Justice: He lives in this big white house down here, second house down.
Interviewer: Well, he told me that, I believe he said he had been in Norris. And when they came…
Mrs. Justice: I don’t know where they came from. I know he worked for Mr. Boggs for years and years, on the farm. He ran the farm. He had 2 boys, both of them were born here; they growed and married. They still live down there. Mrs. Boggs sold them that house after Mr. Boggs died. They were good neighbors.
Interviewer: Maybe you can tell me something about living in Oak Ridge during the early years, from a woman’s point of view. Because you were the one that had to go out and scrounge around and get clothes for your children and find something to put on the table.
Mrs. Justice: Oh, it was terrible to try to do anything. Oak Ridge was just a mud hole to begin with, in the first place. We all had to bring golloshes. And we’d just wade in mud clear up to our knees. That’s before they had any sidewalks or anything. And there were all these bulldozers tearing up the place. And of course, we had stamps. We were just allowed so much. Like soap, or anything like that was all rationed. It was real hard, it was real hard, I’ll tell you.
Interviewer: Did you have much trouble getting clothes for the children?
Mrs. Justice: No, I didn’t have too much trouble getting clothes.
Interviewer: You had to go to Knoxville?
Mrs. Justice: Yes. We had nothing here – no stores or anything like that here.
Interviewer: It used to be, the roads to Knoxville used to be pretty bad.
Mrs. Justice: Terrible. People who lived in Knoxville, in the Miller’s shoe department – that’s where everybody used to go, to the shoe department, and they’d have mud just all over them. Their shoes, their feet were nothing but mud. And they would just carry mud into that store. Seriously, it would [… ? ….] Just as soon as they’d come in, they’d look at their feet and say “well I know where you’re from.” But they had the money to buy, you know, they made good money. And they stayed. So they really were mighty glad to see them even though they were muddy.
Interviewer: Oak Ridge has brought a good bit of money into this area over the years.
Mrs. Justice: Yes, it has.
Interviewer: Along with some other things that maybe haven’t been so much appreciated.
Mrs. Justice: Yeah.
Interviewer: Did you have any idea what they were doing at the plants?
[end of Side 1]
[Side 2]
Mrs. Justice: As I say, I don’t know anything about the City. He, you can talk to Mr. Justice. ‘Course I grew up here.
Interviewer: Yes, of course.
Mrs. Justice: He’s been here, we came down here in ’43.
Interviewer: You both have a lot of interesting things to say.
Mrs. Justice: Oh yes, very interesting. Very interesting. I like it here.
Interviewer: How did you like living behind the locked gate?
Mrs. Justice: I didn’t mind. I didn’t mind.
Interviewer: You didn’t find this too much of a nuisance with relatives?
Mrs. Justice: You had to have a pass to get in. Any outsider, they couldn’t get in here at all unless they had some friend in Oak Ridge who could get them a pass. I got a lot of passes for people to get in.
Interviewer: Did you visit back and forth with the Boggs very much?
Mrs. Justice: Oh yes. I’d come over here. All you do is just show your badge.
Interviewer: It wasn’t any trouble getting in and out if you lived here?
Mrs. Justice: No. I had a badge at the time. See I worked. Everybody that lived in Oak Ridge had a badge. I’d come over here because we lived here.
Interviewer: Did you work during the war years?
Mrs. Justice: Yes, I worked at Cambridge Hall. That was where the higher-up Army people stayed; the colonels, the lieutenants, and all the officers, in that building. I kept that building.
Interviewer: This was sort of a dormitory.
Mrs. Justice: It was a dormitory, Cambridge Hall. That was the name of it. They called it “M6” at the beginning.
Interviewer: They did?
Mrs. Justice: Then they gave it the name “Cambridge Hall”.
Interviewer: Did you know that they’re just tearing it down now?
Mrs. Justice: No, I hadn’t heard that. They are!?
Interviewer: I believe…
Mrs. Justice: They’re tearing some down. Let’s see. I don’t know. They’ve torn down so many. I don’t thing they’re tearing that down yet. It’s right there on Tyron Road, you know.
Interviewer: No, you’re quite right. It’s the other two that were left that they’re tearing down. And Cambridge Hall is not being torn down.
Mrs. Justice: They’re tearing some down.
Interviewer: I guess that was one of the most central ones, and that’s why it had the higher-ranking people there.
Mrs. Justice: That was right in town. That was right in town, and the cafeteria was just right up the hill from Cambridge Hall.
Interviewer: Now, where was the cafeteria?
Mrs. Justice: You know where the post office is? It was the building right straight across from the post office, where the post office is now. Just a great big, long building.
Interviewer: Is that he building that burned a few years ago?
Mrs. Justice: Yes, I believe it is. My son sold newspapers. He was just about 10 years old. He sold newspapers… That was the year that President Roosevelt died.
Interviewer: Mr. Justice said that you lived on Parker Road, I think, in the beginning.
Mrs. Justice: Parker Road. We did. And we moved to West Fairview.
Interviewer: West Fairview. Now that’s off…
Mrs. Justice: That’s just off Tennessee, off Florida. Tennessee then Florida. Tennessee is right here, then Florida. We lived there in a ‘C’ house, until we came here. After my son… They just wouldn’t give you rooms, different bedrooms unless the children were larger. “Cause if they were little, they just had to sleep together. They couldn’t do it. We watched our house go up, on Parker Road. And that was just an ‘A’ house. No, it was a ‘B’, I take that back. It was a ‘B’. And it was just two bedrooms. And I had a pretty hard time getting a 3-bedroom house. But after my son got bigger, you see, and having a daughter and a son, why they’d give you a 3-bedroom house.
Interviewer: Did you have to wait for that very long after you applied?
Mrs. Justice: Oh, yes. I waited quite a while.
Interviewer: How did you apply for a larger house?
Mrs. Justice: Well, I had Mr. Dooley, my boss, he was over the dormitories, he helped me along on that. You just applied at Housing.
Interviewer: At MSI?
Mrs. Justice: Uh huh, and you’d get a house if you were ever going to.
Interviewer: But there was a waiting period?
Mrs. Justice: Oh yes. You had to wait a long time. I thought we never would get it.
Interviewer: What did people in Oak Ridge do for entertainment during the early years when you didn’t have gasoline and couldn’t get in and out? Did they mostly just visit back and forth?
Mrs. Justice: There wasn’t much entertainment – there was just work for everybody. There wasn’t very much, didn’t have any country club. You didn’t have anything. Had a movie. That’s all we had. Just the movie – picture show. That’s all we had in Oak Ridge for entertainment. Only other recreation people could have was a party and invite people. But as far as going to things, there wasn’t anything to go to. And everybody worked. I tell you, that was a time that everybody worked.
Interviewer: Did even the women who had small children work during that time, the ones who were in Oak Ridge? Or were they just not allowed in?
Mrs. Justice: They could work if they could take care of their children. Anybody could get a job. ‘Cause there was just work for everybody. If they could arrange to have somebody take care of their children, they could get a job. Of course I didn’t have to have anybody – my children were big enough and they were in school while I worked, and then I was home.
Interviewer: That worked out very well.
Mrs. Justice: That worked out fine for me. I’d get home most of the time while they were at school.
Interviewer: Where did they go to school?
Mrs. Justice: They both graduated from the high school. My son started out, he was little…. Now my daughter was in her senior year when she came down here from Middlesboro. She was older, you see.
Interviewer: Then did your son go to any of the Oak Ridge elementary schools?
Mrs. Justice: Oh yes. He went to Pine Valley.
Interviewer: To Pine Valley?
Mrs. Justice: That’s off New York. That’s the first school he went to. Then the high school.
Interviewer: The high school then was, I guess…
Mrs. Justice: Up on the hill.
Interviewer: Up on the hill, where the old Jefferson was.
Mrs. Justice: Yes. They both graduated there. They didn’t have the new high school. That’s all they had. Then down at Robertsville, they had, what did they call that? Just the elementary. He never did, I don’t think he went down there. I guess he had to go down there too, after he got done with elementary, he was just about 10 years old. Then he went to junior high, and, that was junior high.
Interviewer: At Robertsville?
Mrs. Justice: Uh huh. Then up on the hill, where he graduated. They both graduated from the high school. The new one was almost completed when my son graduated. I think it was completed the next year. He didn’t get to use it, he was graduated.
Interviewer: Did you find that living costs went up a great deal? Do you think they went up more in Oak Ridge than they did all over the country? Of course they had gone up everywhere, but did you feel that they had gone up…?
Mrs. Justice: Do you mean back then?
Interviewer: Back then.
Mrs. Justice: No, I don’t think so. Everybody, if you lived in Oak Ridge, everybody thought that you had more money than anybody else. They always try to… They’d always hold Oak Ridge people up, because they knew they made good salaries. And they really socked it to them.
Interviewer: That may still be true.
Mrs. Justice: Yeah, oh that’s true, now, yes. They still think that. Oh he’s from Oak Ridge, he makes good money, just let him pay so-and-so.
Interviewer: Did you ever hear any funny stories about what they were making at the plants, or about people trying to get in or out through the gates, or anything like that?
Mrs. Justice: No, I don’t recall. I guess I don’t recall now. I was so busy with my work and my family that I didn’t do anything but work.
Interviewer: I’m sure you were.
Mrs. Justice: ‘Cause if you had family and then worked too. Why, I didn’t have time for foolishness. I didn’t hear anybody else either.
Interviewer: I don’t imagine you did.
Mrs. Justice: But I enjoyed the work. Everybody enjoyed the work. Everybody was happy and just going at a gallop. The streets were just streaming. I mean highways, whatever you called them. Everybody was just going just as hard as they could go, up and down the streets just all the time, just like that. Just a mad rush, certainly a mad rush.
Interviewer: Well, I think really having Oak Ridge come in…
Mrs. Justice: Well it was a wonderful thing, but these people wouldn’t accept it. Clinton fought Oak Ridge like a [?] and it has just made Clinton. It was just a wide place in the road. And, why they’ve spent money up there. It’s an asset to Clinton and they realize that now, but at first they resented Oak Ridgers.
Interviewer: I think there is still some resentment.
Mrs. Justice: Yes, there is. But it really, it certainly has improved. And every little town around here, Oliver Springs, and well, it’s just not ‘cause you can’t mention it, it has improved. Even in Marlow, a little quiet place in the road down here, still, it broadened it out. Every town and place that has a name was improved after Oak Ridge came here.
Interviewer: Are there a great many more people here in the surrounding area, places like Marlow now than there were before?
Mrs. Justice: Yes. A lot of them have left, you know. But a lot of people lived in Marlow, and they lived anywhere they could get. If they couldn’t get anywhere people slept on the ground. Until the houses were built, you know in tents and trailers. The doctors nearly all lived in a trailer.
Interviewer: Really! I hadn’t heard about that.
Mrs. Justice: Yes. Didn’t anybody have a house. ‘Cause where were they going to do until they got to building houses. They had to get a house built. Dr. Aiden [?] down here, I can mention several doctors that lived in trailers. And a lot of people slept on the ground. They slept anywhere in the summertime. Mrs. Boggs kept about 4 or 5 men here, ‘cause she had the room. Although Mr. Boggs liked to have a fit, but she did it anyhow. She just felt terrible having this big house and people lying around on the ground.
Interviewer: I can understand that.
Mrs. Justice: He was a bit selfish about that. He didn’t want anybody in the house. But she just overruled him on that. And she had, and she had a nice guy too. I think she had about 5. Had 2 bedrooms up here, with 3 in one room and two in the other, something like that. So she just overruled him on that, ‘cause she said she just couldn’t bear to see people lying around on the ground, and with those rooms vacant. Wasn’t a soul here, just the two of them. They didn’t have any children. It was selfish.
Interviewer: It was too much room for the two.
Mrs. Justice: And he was just thrilled to death after he knew them. They had more fun. A real nice man.
Interviewer: What did you like best about living in Oak Ridge? Was there any particular thing that you thought was different about it? Was it good living there behind the gates where you didn’t have magazine salesmen and people like that?
Mrs. Justice: That didn’t bother me. I don’t know what all I’d…. I just liked Oak Ridge. It is a nice place to live.
Interviewer: It’s a nice place to live.
Mrs. Justice: I like it. I always liked it. Although I was asked, I guess, I didn’t resent coming. I liked to never got my husband down here. He thought, like everybody else, it was a big bubble that would burst. It wouldn’t amount to anything and he wasn’t going to give up the job he had to come down here and maybe the thing last a short time and then just not have any job. I kept telling him what a good thing it was and how it was growing and all, and he couldn’t see it. He didn’t come down very often and of course I visited a lot, see, this was home. I’d come down, the children and I, and he never did come with us much. Finally, I got him down here and he saw what it was and I just had to just almost drag him down here. It was the best move he ever made. He had a good job, it was much better than what he made up there. It ended up he had a good job: he was manager of the cafeteria down at X-10. It was a good move for us because he wasn’t making very much where he was. Didn’t anybody make very much working at places like that there, because they didn’t have the salary that they did in Oak Ridge. They didn’t pay so much in the beginning, but it kept going up, going up, going up all the time. [pause] I think you’ve gotten about all the information you can get out of me.
Interviewer: I was just looking to see if I had any more questions on my list to ask, and I believe we’ve pretty much covered everything. I would like to take a picture of your house, and I’d like to get one of you and Mr. Justice too if we can.
Mrs. Justice: Can you take it in the house?
Interviewer: If we can get a place where there is a fair amount of light. I might as well turn this off.
[end of recording]